Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Lots of depressing news on the pro-traditional marriage front lately, as judge after judge in state after state decides that only "bigotry" could prevent anybody declaring that two dudes or two dudettes are a "marriage." And after this heady piece of sterling judicial logic, the judges will, no doubt, for an encore decide that one's head and one's buttocks are exactly the same thing since both are body parts, and will insist that public restrooms install fixtures to accommodate those who excrete from their craniums, so as not to promote bigotry and discrimination (because these same judges have already demonstrated that they, personally, think with their...oh, never mind).

Sigh.

The problem is not that religious people have one definition of marriage and godless people have another. The problem is that secular law has been quite comfortable for a long time defining marriage as a contract that was specifically issued to a man and a woman. One of each. Who were exchanging certain rights and duties, which included the right and duty to engage in lawful sexual intercourse with each other (newsflash: there used to be unlawful kinds! Oh, wait, there still are) and to be responsible, together, for any children who might result from the contractual relationship (even if no children ever did).

What is marriage now?

Nobody knows. Nobody.

Oh, sure, there's some legal definition or other in pro-marriage-destruction states like Massachusetts. The problem is that those legal definitions don't make it clear why a marriage contract must necessarily exclude three or more people, incestuous relatives, NON-incestuous relatives, or even friends who aren't into each other sexually. There's no good reason that two heterosexual male college roommates in Massachusetts could not, right now, get "married" to each other in order to take advantage of "married" student housing and special financial aid packages and whatnot, stay "married" through their college years, and then "divorce" in order to marry women (with a nice tax break for the divorce, most likely!) once they graduate; in fact, it might be a smart financial strategy, and a way to take advantage of "diversity" scholarships and the like. Who could possibly object: gay couples, complaining that these two college guys were making a mockery of gay "marriage?" I can't even type that sentence without laughing.

There's no logical reason why marriages can't be among groups of three or more. There's no logical reason why marriages can't involve relatives, friends, and spinster great-aunts who just want to share health insurance benefits. Since marriage is no longer the union of a man and a woman ordered toward the promotion of the natural family, it can be anything.

Which makes it nothing.

The next step will be for single people to sue various state governments on the grounds that penalizing them in tax laws, inheritance laws, benefits calculations, etc. for their relationship status is just as bigoted and hateful as keeping two men or two women from calling themselves a "marriage." I fully expect the rallying cry "Marriage rights for the single!" to be raised once single people realize how badly they are being cheated to subsidize people who choose voluntarily to enter into a contract based on a putatively sex-centered romantic relationship which can be as temporary as the parties to it desire. And, to be honest, I support them. If civil marriage no longer has anything to do with promoting and supporting the natural family, then to hell with it.

1. People say to me a lot, “I have a book in me.” No, I want to say,
you probably don’t. Most people lead perfectly ordinary lives. Or, to
put a fine point on it, the lives most people can recall having led are
perfectly ordinary, because most people are poor storytellers. I’ve been
bored out of my skull listening to someone drone on about some
adventure they had in an exotic locale, and I’ve been utterly captivated
by someone talking about an ordinary event in a quotidian life. The
difference is not the locale or the character of the event; the
difference is in the discernment of the storyteller. You have to be
reflective, and know how to tell the difference between meaningful
details and mere clutter.

2. And you have to be able to get outside of yourself fully enough to
grasp what it is about the story you have to tell that will interest
other people who don’t know you. I’m thinking right now of a couple of
people I’ve known in my life who could be counted on to deliver ordinary
gossip as if they were returned from Troy to break the news of
Achilles’ wrath and its effects. They were so caught up in the
penny-ante drama of these narratives that they failed to see how little
this stuff mattered to people who didn’t have a personal connection with
the dramatis personae (or how little it mattered even to those who did).

Since I didn't entirely agree with Rod, I had a few things to say myself. I don't usually do this, but I'm going to copy my comment here (it hasn't shown up on the site yet, due to standard comment moderation). Here's what I said:

–I do think most people have a book in them. If they are decent
writers there may even be a decent book in them. But there is nearly
always a bad book in there first. Write it. Get it out of the way. If
you survive the process, then you’ll know whether you want to keep at
this long enough to write the good book, or if you’re done.

–Flannery O’Connor was asked if universities stifle writers. Her
reply, that they don’t stifle nearly enough of them, is still the best
way of looking at the situation.

–Despite all of the advice poured out on would-be writers from time
immemorial, there is no one right way to proceed. Sure, you won’t be
able to write books about foreign travel if you don’t do any. And it’s a
mistake to write a book about a hideously dysfunctional ghetto family
whose teenage son is a suicidal heroin addict who cuts himself as a cry
for help when he’s not turning tricks to help feed his three much
younger half-siblings amid the squalor of his mother’s apartment that
she shares with her new jailbird boyfriend who is hiding from law
enforcement because he killed his last girlfriend–if you, the writer,
grew up in a nice middle-class community somewhere in the flatlands and
know nothing about crimes or ghettos that you haven’t seen on TV (unless
you are determined to write YA fiction, in which case, give your teen
anti-hero a first-person narrative, a crossbow, and a secret portal to a
world overrun with demons and you’re good). However, it’s important
not to overlook that three terribly sheltered young ladies named Bronte
wrote some of the most interesting books ever written in the English
language, or that Shakespeare was somewhat slighted by the literati of
his day for violating the Unities (and for being a commoner, unless you
really think he was a front for an anonymous nobleman, which I have
never believed for a minute myself).

–There is a LOT of room for dabblers and dreamers in writing. You do
not have to be capable of Deathless Prose for the Ages to have the
right to put words on paper (pixels on a screen, these days, but that
doesn’t sound nearly so good). Some of the most rollicking good reads
have been written by people who didn’t really have the writing chops to
be published, and some of the dullest stuff is the stuff written by the
Important Writers of a century or so ago.

–This has been said here before, but if you are a writer, then it is
simply necessary to write. You can worry about whether anything you
ever wrote was good later in life, if you have the time, and if you
actually care about that sort of thing.

Writers, weigh in! Do you agree with Rod, with me, or with neither of us?

Either we’re pro-life or we’re not pro-life, and firing an unwed pregnant Catholic school teacher
is not pro-life no matter how you slice it. I don’t care what her
contract said. I don’t buy the notion that children will be scandalized.
None of it washes. Let’s face facts. We are all sinners. Some of us,
unfortunately, sin in ways that are much more public than others, and so
we are called out while everyone else slides by with their private sins
rolling merrily along.

Let’s look at one single aspect of this case: Okay, a single woman
becomes pregnant, tells her superiors at her Catholic school that she
plans to keep her baby, and is subsequently fired by “higher ups” in the
Diocese of Helena after officials receive an anonymous letter,
according to news reports. What do you think happens the next time a
single Catholic school teacher finds herself pregnant with no husband?
Yeah, abortion might be the obvious choice if she thinks she might lose
her job otherwise. So much for that pro-life thing.

Every time this topic comes up, I find some of the most frustrating comments and perspectives coming from certain types of Catholic laymen, who think that unwed pregnancy is always solely the woman's fault and that she (and her child) should have to pay any price, including homelessness and lifelong poverty, for her grave sin of fornication--and meanwhile, it's just "biology" that her male partner in grave sin is totally off the hook after a good confession which does not have to include any promise on his part to help pay for the child's care or anything (because she can't even prove the kid is his until after the baby is born, and only then if she pays for a paternity test, so why should he worry when for all he knows she's a lying wanton who has been with dozens of men during their dating relationship?). But, of course, these same men are quite vocally pro-life (though some of them have claimed at times that women's suffrage inevitably led to the legalization of abortion, and that if we want a truly just, pro-life society where no man is ever tricked by some evil temptress into impregnating her out of wedlock all we have to do is end women's voting rights--a pretty bizarre reach, if you ask me).

Mary DeTurris Poust isn't buying that kind of thing at all. If we're really pro-life, she says, we'll stop firing unwed pregnant women for the sin of being unwed and pregnant. I couldn't agree more.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

BUTTE - The Diocese of Helena is defending its decision to fire an unwed Butte Central teacher because she is pregnant.

Shaela
Evenson “made a willful decision to violate the terms of her contract,”
which requires her to follow Catholic teachings in both her personal
and professional life, Superintendent Patrick Haggarty said Tuesday.
“It’s a sensitive issue, and it’s unfortunate all around.”

This morning, Haggarty defended the decision in a new interview with The Montana Standard.

"It’s
not easy being a Christian or a Catholic in today’s world," Haggarty
said. "Our faith asks us to do things that right now are not popular
with society. I’m really OK, I’m not comfortable, but I’m OK with what’s
transpired. Being a Christian is this way, we’re asked to do things
that are not popular with our society."

I think that my opinions on this topic are already known. But here's my basic problem with this: yes, engaging in premarital sex is a violation of a Catholic school teacher's contract, and if Shaela Evenson is living with her boyfriend or otherwise committed to a lifestyle of grave sin, then the school likely has no choice here.

However, we MUST stop acting like it is the pregnancy that is the sin. The way these cases have played out, nobody in any Catholic school district seems to care at all if their teachers are fornicating regularly, committing adultery, using contraception, or even having abortions--but if an unmarried female teacher is pregnant and does not keep her pregnancy a secret by killing the child via abortion and quietly showing back up at work after her "sick day," she must be fired.

As I see it, justice, to be justice, has to be equitably applied. How is it even possible to apply justice equitably when every unmarried male Catholic schoolteacher could be fornicating regularly without ever risking his job, while an unmarried female teacher could make an error of judgment and fornicate just once, end up pregnant, and be kicked to the curb for that error?

The risk, as I see it, is that pregnancy--not fornication, but pregnancy--is going to become a new "scarlet letter," with the letter P--pregnant--standing for "conduct unbecoming of a Catholic schoolteacher," and the choice not to kill an unborn child costing women in a crisis pregnancy their jobs in Catholic schools.

There's a different "P" I'd like to see Catholic schools stand for: Pro-life. And sometimes being pro-life in our society means that we have to do, as Superintendent Haggerty said, "...things that right now are not popular
with society..." Like refusing to pit a mother against her unborn child as the cost of keeping her job, for instance.

Monday, February 3, 2014

Curiously, it is the kind of flat that actually made me angry
as I read it. I am not the kind of person who sniffs at “low culture.”
Still, something like “Divergent” has been so hastily assembled, and
then so cynically marketed, that I cannot help being offended on the
part of the reading public. I know it sells, and God knows that
publishing needs the money. But the pushing of this stuff is starting to
make me feel as if we’re all suckers. Cruelly, the gilded age of
young-adult literature threatens to suck the life out of the whole
thing.

It
isn’t hard to see what has brought us here. It’s money, plain and
simple. I wouldn’t turn my nose up at cold, hard cash either (like
Somerset Maugham, I often wonder if the people who speak contemptuously
of it have ever had to do without). But let’s be clear that the chase of
it guides people into all kinds of misadventures. In publishing, that
means hunting down every young person with an aspiration to write a
dystopian or fantasy epic. Even if they might not sell 450 million
copies (as Scholastic claims Rowling has), the industry is certainly
prepared to accept the consolation prize of the 65 million copies that
“The Hunger Games” sold domestically.

Few
are bothered by the costs of this excitement, though successful writers
in the young-adult market do seem to have noticed the way the industry
depends on them. John Green, whose (excellent, though non-epic)
young-adult novel “The Fault in Our Stars ” will get its own film
adaptation in May, explained his predicament to The Chicago Tribune last
fall: “It’s a massive amount of pressure, and not just from fans, but
from people whose jobs are on the line because of what you write.” And
that pressure’s twin seems to be a blunt carelessness in selecting and
editing new work for publication. Most of these Next Big Things appear
to have escaped any serious redlining. It seems their “editors” simply
pray to the gods of chance that the author lands on a critical
featherbed, rather than being thrown to the wolves.

Do read the whole thing; the problems plaguing young-adult fiction are a topic I'm always interested in, and I hope to get back out here to discuss this later in the week, but in the meantime, please feel free to comment.

On the subject of children's fiction--here's the request part of this post. If you have read my second book, A Smijj of Adventure, would you consider leaving a review on Amazon? I am really interested in honest reviews, positive or negative (though to be fair the only person to leave a negative review on The Telmaj was a blog-stalker who pretty clearly didn't buy the book, and the negative review was all about her dislike of my conservative politics and nothing about the book itself).

If you can do this, I'd really appreciate it! And since there aren't any reviews as of yet--why not be the first? :)

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About Me

I'm Catholic. Period. Not to be confused with "I'm Catholic, but..."
I'm conservative. Not Republican. Yes, there is a difference.
I'm a retired homeschooling mom; I taught my daughters at home from kindergarten through high school. No, I don't know any good crafts. Crafts at my house end with something glued somewhere it shouldn't be. All my art is abstract, if 'lumpy' is synonymous with 'abstract.' But I do write and publish children's fiction.
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My Jesus,I believe that Youare present in the Most Holy Sacrament.I love You above all things,and I desire to receive You into my soul.Since I cannot at this momentreceive You sacramentally,come at least spiritually into my heart. I embrace You as if You were already there and unite myself wholly to You. Never permit me to be separated from You.